Just some COVID reading

[Abby Cange]

Below is a post on facebook made by Scott Aaronson - an acquaintance of mine from freshman year of college.  I didn't know him well then, mostly because while I happened to manage to get into in the early entrance program at Clarkson and started college early, he is actually a true genius and is two years younger than me - making him a college freshman at age 14.  I also didn't have any classes with him, and he went on to become a theoretical computer scientist specializing in quantum theory, or some shit.  Anyway - he wrote this long post from his family vacation and I found it interesting and depressing.

--Abby

I've made what might have been the single worst error of judgment in my 40 years of life. If any good will come of it, it's only in the confession and warning that I now feel morally compelled to give my friends.

One month ago, my 8-year-old daughter Lily, who just finished the Harry Potter series, begged to go to Universal Studios in Orlando over Christmas break to see their Harry Potter park. It seemed like a good time: Lily (and her 4-year-old brother Daniel) hadn't enjoyed any trip of this kind since before the pandemic, Lily at last would finally be vaccinated, Dana and I had just gotten our booster shots, Delta was in retreat, and covid numbers were actually extremely low in Florida. Plus we figured it would be mainly outdoors, and we'd mask, and Dana found a website claiming it wouldn't be very crowded on the dates we wanted to visit.

So I plunked down a few grand for (non-refundable) tickets. And then, literally the next day, we learned about the Omicron variant from South Africa. And to my eternal shame, I didn't cancel the trip, despite my understanding of exponential growth. I couldn't bear to face my daughter and tell her she wasn't going after all, nor could I bear to face my family and tell them the planning and money were all wasted.

So now we're here. And the reality is: it's crowded as hell -- one of the most unpleasant, sardine-packed places I've ever experienced in my life, before *or* during covid. The majority of guests (and even many employees) are unmasked. It's mostly indoor. For every single ride, you stand for more than an hour in cramped, enclosed waiting areas while hordes of unmasked people breathe on you. It's obviously an Omicron superspreader site. Indeed, the chances that one or more of us caught it today are EXCEEDINGLY high. Plus ... it's not even fun, like Disney World is. It sucks. Just endless lines, crowds, ripoffs, and uninspired rides.

Many of the rides play jokey recorded audio messages about how the ride is so terrifying, how much danger you're in, phew you survived it, etc. etc. All those messages now take on new, unapproved meanings.

From the minute we arrived, I started saying "we have to leave this place, we have to leave, WE HAVE TO LEAVE NOW" -- and yet, I'm ashamed to say, it took us 5+ hours to do so. I kept deferring to the ... err ... majority vote among my family, that we shouldn't make a TOTAL loss of this trip, and surely we can find *something* here that's *relatively* covid-safe?

Our mistake did, at least, give me perhaps my first opportunity of this entire pandemic to stare directly into the heart of the half of the country for which ***the virus might as well not be real*** -- and I found the view absolutely terrifying, and it's given me a new, visceral understanding for how we managed to lose 800,000+ Americans, and that understanding will stay with me as long as I live.

I'm sorry to everyone for whom I was a bad example. I'm sorry to everyone who my family might have endangered. Please learn from our mistake.

In the meantime, do any of my friends have suggestions for what to do for the rest of this trip? (Where one possibility is, "take the next flight back to Austin and never look back"?)

ADDED: Dana wanted me to emphasize how Universal Studios is endangering lives for greed, by packing people way, WAY more densely than can possibly be safe.

Lily, alone among us, actually enjoyed the park (!) and wants to return to it tomorrow.